Explaining religion to my child was harder than I thought. I understood how to be religious with my family. We sang our prayers, went to worship and dressed up. Lord knows that taking a baby to a church that was 45 minutes away was essentially a day trip with snacks and clothing changes. We talked about God and how God lives inside of us and how we can always talk with God. So I thought I was doing the religious education job.

And then my kid goes to school with other kids and learns that other families do religion differently. My friends practice different religions and so we had close family interactions with people who are Jewish and Muslim. But I hadn’t really explained these differences. So the kid comes home and says, “What is our religion?” 

​My first thought was, “Well, it’s complicated …” But I didn’t say that. I said something about the places where we worship and the leaders we love as family. (Shout out to Pastor Mark, Baba Fasegun and Rev. Michael.)

And then the kid says “Ifa isn’t our religion. It’s our culture.”

I thought about it for a couple moments and said, “Yes.” 

Our practice of Ifa permeates our home life – how we say prayers, how we greet and talk about and feed ancestors, how we dress, what we value, etc. Ifa shapes how we see the world. I’d like to think the same could be said about the parts of our faith that are Christian and New Thought, but Ifa is what stood out to my then five year-old. 

Scholars spend a lot of time teasing out the intermeshed relationship between religion and culture. Our lives are cultured. So our religious experiences are cultured as well. Religions don’t float around in outer space – they are anchored in, formed in, grow in culture. And culture changes. We move religions in and among cultures. Sometimes we bring a culture with a religion when that religion is introduced to and practiced in another culture. A lot of things go wrong when that happens. Religion and culture evolve, adapt and change with context and experience, yet they both have roots. Must Arabic culture come along with Islam? Why does Protestant Christianity look so different between white Americans and Black Americans? Can we adopt a religion rooted in a different culture than our own without appropriating the culture? These are big and important questions.

What I can say is that I love that our beliefs and practices were so interwoven into our family’s daily life that my child thought of it as our culture. It’s just the way we are. It’s the air we breathe; the water we swim in.

As my child has grown older, the conversations about religion are more complicated and nuanced. My child is more conscious of the different beliefs of our friends and family and actively engages in lively debate with cousins about religion, creation and politics. They understand their differences, shout about them vehemently, and still come out playing with each other 20 minutes later. There’s a safety there because it’s occurring in the safety of shared family values and a shared African American cultural experience. 

Many of us still feel the tensions among religion and culture. We may engage in religious community that is different from our racial or gendered cultures. We may be learning a new culture along with our religious practice. We may be drawn to certain religions because of our cultural heritage.